With Whistler expected to debut on CTV shortly, Blueprint Entertainment is readying a new slate of series and MOWs for shoots this spring and summer.

The border-straddling company – which copro’d the 13 x 60 Whistler with Boardwatch Productions – just wrapped the MOW A Woman Scorned for Global and Lifetime and, for those same channels, will shoot the Chistmas-y Let It Snow this spring in Hamilton.

Mark Jean (So Weird, Live Through This) directs on a lean budget – somewhere around $2 million. Blueprint will have roughly the same spending money when it shoots the TV movies Absolution and Intimate Strangers later this year, again for U.S.-based Lifetime.

Blueprint’s romantic comedy MOW Playing House is also set to air on CTV March 24, followed by an April 16 date on Lifetime.

Lifetime is ordering a lot of MOWs these days, but its prebuy fees are ‘relatively modest,’ says Blueprint principal John Morayniss, on the phone from L.A. ‘We take that relatively low fee and we add some Canadian content, to benefit a Canadian sale, and some international dollars as well, and we can do these movies.’

‘The way it makes sense to do these movies is volume. Each doesn’t generate a lot of profit. But if you set up a system like we have in Toronto ­- where you have a really great production team – you become very efficient with the limited dollars,’ he adds. ‘And it looks not bad.’

Blueprint productions in Toronto are headed by Suzanne Berger (Playing House) who, like Morayniss and Halpern, is a former Alliance Atlantis exec.

Holly Dale (Bliss) will helm Absolution. A director has not yet signed to Intimate Strangers. Morayniss exec produces on all projects with his partner Noreen Halpern.

Blueprint is also looking for a Canadian caster to buy into its kid-aimed reality series Family Tree. The 26 x 30 ‘Survivor meets Big Brother in a gigantic tree house’ got the nod from Nickelodeon, but needs more cash to complete the undisclosed but ‘very expensive’ budget, says Morayniss.

Why so much? The giant tree house, of course. The set has to be big enough to hold seven sets of siblings, who will live together for a month.

‘The set build is really expensive. It’s not just building a set that looks like a tree house, it actually has to work,’ he says. If it shoots, it will have to shoot fast, because Nickelodeon wants to air the series by September.

Meanwhile, the company continues to test the waters of scripted series. Season two of the gay-aimed 8 x 30 Noah’s Arc goes to camera in Vancouver in May for Logo, under showrunner Patrik-Ian Polk, while the 26 x 30 toon Iggy Arbuckle is in prep for Teletoon. Blueprint has just signed its animation deal with CORE Digital Pictures and plans to announce details on Iggy shortly.

Blueprint also hopes to score another one-hour drama with ABC Family and expects to see a script for Nobody, from Kevin Muprhy (Desperate Housewives), within six weeks. It’s loosely based on a comic book.

‘The concept is ‘a secret agent who works for heaven.’ So it’s a fairly high-concept show,’ says Halpern. ‘The plan is to shoot the pilot this summer, so the key will be to get a broadcaster on in Canada.’